In this paper structures that actively use bending as a self-forming process are reviewed. By bringing together important material developments and various historical as well as recently built ...samples of such structures, the aim is to show coherences in their design approach, structural systems and behaviour. Different approaches to bending-active structures are defined and described. By making this work accessible and categorising it, this paper aims to contribute to an emerging development.
A differentiation of such structures is suggested based on their design approaches. Three such approaches are differentiated: the behaviour based approach, the geometry based approach and current research that seeks to integrate the two. In this paper the nature of these approaches and some important project samples are discussed.
According to the World Health Organization(WHO), it is estimated that approximately 1.3 billion people live with some forms of vision impairment globally, of whom 36 million are blind. Due to their ...disability, engaging these minority into the society is a challenging problem. The recent rise of smart mobile phones provides a new solution by enabling blind users' convenient access to the information and service for understanding the world. Users with vision impairment can adopt the screen reader embedded in the mobile operating systems to read the content of each screen within the app, and use gestures to interact with the phone. However, the prerequisite of using screen readers is that developers have to add natural-language labels to the image-based components when they are developing the app. Unfortunately, more than 77% apps have issues of missing labels, according to our analysis of 10,408 Android apps. Most of these issues are caused by developers' lack of awareness and knowledge in considering the minority. And even if developers want to add the labels to UI components, they may not come up with concise and clear description as most of them are of no visual issues. To overcome these challenges, we develop a deep-learning based model, called Labeldroid, to automatically predict the labels of image-based buttons by learning from large-scale commercial apps in Google Play. The experimental results show thatour model can make accurate predictions and the generated labels are of higher quality than that from real Android developers.
Visualizations are now widely used across disciplines to understand and communicate data. The benefit of visualizations lies in leveraging our natural visual perception. However, the sole dependency ...on vision can produce unintended discrimination against people with visual impairments. While the visualization field has seen enormous growth in recent years, supporting people with disabilities is much less explored. In this work, we examine approaches to support this marginalized user group, focusing on visual disabilities. We collected and analyzed papers published for the last 20 years on visualization accessibility. We mapped a design space for accessible visualization that includes seven dimensions: user group, literacy task, chart type, interaction, information granularity, sensory modality, assistive technology. We described the current knowledge gap in light of the latest advances in visualization and presented a preliminary accessibility model by synthesizing findings from existing research. Finally, we reflected on the dimensions and discussed opportunities and challenges for future research.
In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a public charge, or ...a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to pay back benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform.Park argues that the notions of public charge and public burden were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of disciplining immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the public charge doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of public charge continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system.
•To-bus accessibility and by-bus accessibility significantly affect housing prices in the bus-dependent city.•Spatial heterogeneity exists in the price effects of bus accessibility.•Bus frequency ...exerts a larger price effect in the peripheral area than in the central.
Accessibility to transit facilities is perceived to affect property prices. However, accessibility by transit has rarely elicited adequate scholarly attention in property price analyses. Additionally, previous studies on how transit accessibility affects property prices mainly focused on rail and bus rapid transit systems, while conventional bus transit, which is very popular in many contexts, has seldom been investigated. Moreover, whether there is spatial heterogeneity in the price (or capitalization) effects of conventional bus accessibility remains to be explored. To fill these gaps, this study aims to investigate the role of accessibility to and by bus in determining housing prices in a bus-dependent city where urban transit service is offered mainly by a bus system rather than other transit systems. Using a database of 4966 condominium units in Xiamen, China, this study develops a battery of spatial econometric models to estimate global and local relationships between to-bus and by-bus accessibility and housing prices. The findings are as below: (1) to-bus accessibility (measured by the number of nearby bus stops) is positively associated with nearby housing prices; (2) by-bus accessibility (measured by travel time to city centers by bus and bus frequency) significantly affects nearby housing prices; (3) spatial heterogeneity exists in the price effects of bus accessibility; and (4) bus frequency exerts a larger price effect in the peripheral area than in the central. Finally, practical and policy implications are discussed.
The diffusion of super(125)I super(-) in compacted Gaomiaozi (GMZ) bentonite was investigated by capillary in-diffusion method. Apparent and effective diffusion coefficients and accessible porosity ...of iodide in GMZ bentonite were obtained, and the effect of ionic strength on diffusion parameters was studied. The apparent diffusion coefficients of iodide in compacted GMZ bentonite are in the range of 1.0-6.0 x 10 super(-10) m super(2) s super(-1) under the conditions of dry bulk density 1,500 kg m super(-3) and temperature 298 K, and increase with increasing ionic strength. This effect was explained through the analysis of microscopic structure of compacted bentonite. The iodide can only diffuse in unbound interparticle pore solution of compacted bentonite. The apparent diffusion coefficient is a function of accessible porosity which is decided by the thickness of diffusion double layer, and the thickness is in turn controlled by ionic strength.
Following China's example, on March 30, at the direction of US President Donald Trump, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees the nation's major public health programmes, ...issued what it termed “an unprecedented array of temporary regulatory waivers and new rules to equip the American healthcare system with maximum flexibility to respond to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic”. The risk–benefit ratio for virtual health care has massively shifted and all the red tape has suddenly been cut.” In Italy, although all 20 regions had implemented national telemedicine guidelines as of 2018, hospital managers have been largely caught off guard by the explosion in digital demand, says Elena Sini, information officer for GVM Care & Research, a network of nine private hospitals in northern Italy. With mobile phone use now globally ubiquitous, technological barriers to the adoption of virtual health care are easily surmountable, even in the most resource-scarce settings, notes Alex Jadad, founder of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University of Toronto, ON, Canada, where he is the director of the Institute for Global Health Equity and Innovation.
Reimagining global health Farmer, Paul; Kleinman, Arthur; Kim, Jim ...
2013., 20130918, 2013, 2013-09-07, Volume:
26
eBook
Bringing together the experience, perspective and expertise of Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Arthur Kleinman, Reimagining Global Health provides an original, compelling introduction to the field of ...global health. Drawn from a Harvard course developed by their student Matthew Basilico, this work provides an accessible and engaging framework for the study of global health. Insisting on an approach that is historically deep and geographically broad, the authors underline the importance of a transdisciplinary approach, and offer a highly readable distillation of several historical and ethnographic perspectives of contemporary global health problems. The case studies presented throughout Reimagining Global Health bring together ethnographic, theoretical, and historical perspectives into a wholly new and exciting investigation of global health. The interdisciplinary approach outlined in this text should prove useful not only in schools of public health, nursing, and medicine, but also in undergraduate and graduate classes in anthropology, sociology, political economy, and history, among others.
Active accessibility Vale, David S.; Saraiva, Miguel; Pereira, Mauro
Journal of transport and land use,
01/2016, Volume:
9, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Active travel is enthusiastically promoted in the Western world due to its clear and demonstrated individual and collective benefits. While active travel has been shown to be associated with features ...of the built environment such as density and land-use mix, it is also associated with walking and cycling accessibility-which we designate as active accessibility. However, the measurement of active accessibility is not straightforward and it can represent significantly different features of the built environment. This paper presents an extensive review of published research that measures active accessibility. We classified the literature into four categories based on the methodology used: distance-based, gravity-based or potential, topological or infrastructure-based, and walkability and walk score-type measures. A fifth category was created to classify outliers consisting of distinct methodological approaches or hybrids of the four main categories. We argue that almost all of these methods have conceptual and computational limitations, and that there are inconsistencies in the use of concepts and terms. Furthermore, no sensitivity analysis was carried out on the selected parameters. We conclude by presenting some guidelines that might improve the value and clarity of active accessibility research, theory, and practice.
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